Glad to hear you’re liking Chrono Ark! I think it’s an absolute banger and a must play for roguelike deckbuilder fans. I still need to finish it up by getting to 100% and getting the true ending.

Rise of the Ronin has really hooked me. I don’t know what it is about it or if it is just that I was craving some open world slop, but it’s hitting all the right spots in my brain currently. I think the Team Ninja special sauce in the combat helps keep me interested - there is quite a lot of depth and opportunity to optimise and style on your enemies and it also feels very rewarding doing so. Getting into a fast flow where you’re constantly swapping styles and weapons to use martial art techniques while weaving in parries gets really frenetic and fun.

Overall for my tastes it feels like a better version of Ghost or Tsushima. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing objectivity here. Tsushima looks better, has better presentation and is way better optimised. I’m just having more fun with Ronin than I did with Ghost.

It also helps to have some more charm and levity among the characters and writing instead of every single thing being delivered in a dour and serious monotone like in GoT.

I think the BP parallels came from the combination of the art style, it being set in a vast mansion and a “daily energy” mechanic. I can definitely see it from the outside even though it seems like they play nothing alike.

I’m trying to keep myself unspoiled on Titanium Court as it’s getting such buzz about its writing and world building, but definitely curious. I liked the reveal trailer video though.

I don’t own a headset but my brother-in-law does and I’ve played some Pacific Drive VR at his place. It’s amazing, the game was meant for VR in my opinion. Would be even better with full native support of course so you could use your hands on the steering wheel and handbrake etc instead of driving with controller.

How is Seance of Blake Manor? I heard some people facetiously call it the first Blue Prince-like. But despite that I’ve heard nothing but good things.

Also heard some mumbles raving about how good Titanium Court is, so definitely keeping an eye on it.

If you have a headset for it then Pacific Drive is amazing with the UEVR mod. God how I wish it had native VR support.

Rise of the Ronin

Open world slop brainrot hit me just right (been over a year since my last game in the genre) and I’ve been thoroughly absorbed. After some stressful months I guess I really needed the free dopamine of collecting cats and clearing out the map.

That being said, the combat in this game is actually fantastic and just as good as people have been saying. I’m only at the very start of it and haven’t even begun to master the intricacies, but I love that there is a dojo you can train in and I will probably spend some time there practicing stance- and weapon switching. While the movelist seems restrictive at first, it expands quite significantly once you unlock the skills that let you seamlessly flow between stances and weapons and I need to sit down and memorize all the moves I actually have available in my loadout. Add to that stuff like jump-parrying to vault over the enemy, using the grappling rope or shurikens or the handgun…

It’s only been a couple of fights so far where I managed to get into some kind of flow, but those felt absolutely phenomenal. Great, satisfying parry in this game, too.

Damn you, I am a Team Ninja fan and had already heard good things about the combat, but had put off RoR because of the mixed reception it got. Now you’re making me rethink myself. In fact, I just installed the game (though curtesy it Fitgirl for now until I know how I feel about it). It’s been a while since I played some open world slop, I might be in the mood for that…

I am never getting through my backlog am I?

I like this a lot.

How difficult is the platforming, and how much do the assist modes help with that? I was very curious about MIO because it looks so damn gorgeous, but I suck at and hate precision platforming.

Oh really? That’s interesting, the combat is the only thing I’ve heard praises about that game (which makes sense as it’s a Team Ninja game).

Are you playing on PC? What’s the state of the port these days? I remember when it launched it was struggling with performance issues.

Yeah, especially with age I find myself less interested in those 150+ hour games. One of the reasons I haven’t considered dipping into the Persona series.

For me, I haven’t played that much this week so I’m still on the same games as last week. Chrono Ark continues to be excellent, and a wholehearted recommend if you’re into roguelike deckbuilders. Ninja Gaiden 4 is the best new action game in ages, and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is even more fun than before with some mods - most recently the Modified Moveset Mod.

I have no idea why it’s been prioritised for the iOS app store, but either it’s a case of its creator being an iPhone user, or American I guess (I believe iPhone still has a majority market share in the US).

It’s available, but I don’t know about ready. You can register freely, you can download a phone app (through apk) and you can scroll. When I tried it the other week it still failed to deliver any worthwhile content in a quick enough time. I don’t think the recommendation algorithm is good enough (although there also just isn’t a ton of stuff on there in general).

It does also lack a lot of features, I think the biggest one is a built-in editor. Right now every video must be single take and that’s going to be in the way of mass adoption.

That’s super cool. Hopefully this can be a nice boost.

I think this is prime for a Netflix animated show. Would definitely watch that.

Thunder was still not quite what I was looking for last time I tried it. I am very happy with Summit now, personally.

This is longer than he’s ever been MIA for before, this time I think it’s about 2 years since the last update, and there are several literally critical bugs. But this is the downside with absentee developers like that, you never know for sure whether it’s abandonware or not. But he seems to be actively working on other stuff still so I just don’t think Lemmy took off enough in popularity for him to feel like it’s worth his time monetarily. Makes sense if this was always more of a business than a passion project, which is the way it appears to be to me.

I love Sync but be aware that it is no longer being actively developed. It has some bugs that will never be fixed, and might break entirely in the future.

They saw the porn was gone and decided “nah, fuck it”.